SES - customer concerned that their emails will be marked as spam and disable the account's ability to send email

Question

Team,

A customer wants to send automated emails [alerts, notifications, etc.] from their SaaS solution using SES. 
They are concerned that the emails sent from their system will be marked as spam and disable the account's ability to send email - thus affecting all of the system's tenants.

Customer wording: **"Our concern is for Application emails that configured by our end users and can be recognized as ‘spam’ by SES".**

The customer currently considers using another solution because they are concerned that their ability to send emails will be suddenly blocked without any prior notification. *[I will elaborate about the review process in my next meeting with them, but I also noticed that in 'serious' cases we can disable their ability to send email without any notice]

A couple of questions regarding this situation:

1. What is the probability of that the happen in the first place given this use case [automated emails]? 
  
 2. Do we have references for proper guidance for mitigating this chance by using the right content
    and pattern of sending emails?
 
 3. How this situation can be mitigated once it happens? (I'm planning
   to explain about the review period, the the Deliverability Dashboard
   and the ability to send notifications as preventive measures).

4. Is there any suggested backup plan in case the account disable action happens? (like for example keeping a separate account with the ability to send email)?

Thanks in advance.

AWS-User-6833802 · Accepted Answer

Amazon SES uses in-house content filtering technologies to scan email content for spam and malware. If we determine that an account is sending spam or malicious content, we will pause that account's ability to send additional email.

If their e-mail is going to be marked as spam by their recipients, it's going to affect their deliverability. If the rates at which they are marked as spam go above some thresholds they are going to be facing issues with us and eventually could lead to suspension in their ability to send e-mail with SES.

SES requires customers to have a clean e-mail database. That means that they need implement a process to act upon  rejects/bounces/compaints as they happen. If they keep a clean database they should not face any issue with SES.
 
A backup up plan can include from having a stand-by configuration on a different e-mail provider, to an MTA running in an EC2 instance. They should have in mind that those services usually will need some time to "warm up" before being able to handle all the e-mail traffic

Amazon SES Best Practices: Top 5 Best Practices for List Management: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-best-practices-top-5-best-practices-for-list-management/

Amazon SES Sending Review Process FAQs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/e-faq.html

SES - customer concerned that their emails will be marked as spam and disable the account's ability to send email

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